Let me be blunt: I'm not talking about a woman who sexts her boyfriend only to find the picture disseminated. If the roles were reveresed, he would not face a bucketload of harassment or diminished job prospects. She's not doing something malicious or unkind.

No, I am talking about guys who harass women on Twitter by sending rape threats. (See: what happened with Curt Schilling's 17-year-old daughter. Though I am frankly side-eyeing his assertion that you can't understand this if you're a man unless you have a daughter. Dude, I am a woman and have no sons and I figured out a long time ago that men and boys are human. If you can't figure out that girls and women are human beings unless you have one of your own, I don't even know what to say to you. Also side-eyeing the idea that it's internet anonymity behind this, since men have said stuff like that to me face-to-face, and people Tweet stuff like this under their own names all the time.)

I am talking about recruiters who send women who have publicly talked about sexual harassment weird emails, basically rationalizing the harassment. How gross do you have to be? This jacknape apparently thought that he'd somehow upset her into being his buddy? You are a recruiter. You work with people. If you can't figure out that this is unprofessional and frankly creepy, you need to get into another line of work. One that is preferably done in a cave on the moon.

(Also, what he said was monumentally obtuse. I work with men in my field and they manage to not talk about how they want to grope me. Weird, I know.)

Your target may not have a lot of power. But your target can and just might make your email public. Your target might point her friends to your threatening Tweets or Facebook posts and those friends might take screenshots. Your target might figure out where you work, or who your wife is, and clue them in about how you've been spending your time. The police don't take online threats or harassment that seriously (yet) but other people do and you will get blowback.

In short, this is going to come back to bite you. And I will not feel at all sorry for someone who loses their job, finds the need to couch surf while his wife decides if she wants to stay married to a threatening creeper, or has to explain themselves to people in the future.

You know why? Because I and other women have had to deal with the business end of harassment for all of our lives. And it's not okay.

Thursday, March 12, 2015

I sold my place a couple of years ago and moved closer to where I had worked, which was far away from the city. I hadn't worked in the city for years--my previous jobs were in the burbs and they required sitting in traffic to get to. I figured, I liked where I worked. They seemed to like me. So I bought a house here. And got laid off a few weeks after.

And now I'm commuting two hgours each way into the city. (YES FEEL FREE TO USE ME AS AN EXAMPLE THE NEXT SOME SOME AFFLUENT JACKNAPE STARTS BLEATING THAT WE SHOULD ALL LIVE CLOSER TO WORK I MEAN SERIOUSLY SHUT UP.)

That's actually fine because I'm working (applied for and got a higher-level job working for the same person and in the same group, actually). Mortgage is getting paid. I live near the beach. Life's good. It has a long commute but I'll live.

Then the snowpocalypse happened. In case you want to snark about crybaby New Englanders, I'll just point out that we got 100 inches of snow in under three weeks. We got blizzards and severe storms every 2-3 days. People's roofs were starting to collapse. Our public transportation system shut down (and isn't entirely operational even now) thanks to the snow. People who were paid by the hour, who didn't get paid if they didn't work, are now in a precarious situation thanks to the fact that public transport is toast and they couldn't get to work.

It has been, quite frankly, awful, and I haven't had the patience or the wherewithal to be even remotely nice or positive. I am all out of patience.

However, there has been one weird bright spot, which is this: My commuter bus has been consistently able to get me to work on days there have not been storms. (My workplace closed during storms and sometimes the day after so crews could clear away the snow.) People who take the train have been out of luck, which I think is just weird. If I stayed in my old place, which was walking distance to the train, I would not have been able to make it in by using the commuter train. There hasn't been one running since the first storm, apparently. People are either driving in or driving to a different train station.

Where I currently am? I was able to get in. Granted, it was a little later than usual thanks to so many people driving as a result of dysfunctional public transport. However, I got in. On time. And I got in this week. EARLY.

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About Me

This blog is called Feral Homemaking because unlike other blogs out there, I am not a stay-at-home mom (no kids, actually, though I love being an aunt) or a full-time homemaker. I work a paying job that I quite enjoy. I was never one of those people who couldn't do basic things like laundry, but I had a lot to learn, and am still learning.
This blog is for anyone--anyone at all--who enjoys cooking, who wants to pick up different ways to save money, or who wants to improve their homemaking skills. Even if you work full time, you have to eventually have to do this stuff.
At any rate, you'll all feel better about the skills you already have since, frankly, you'll hear more about my misadventures than my triumphs.